11/16/17 Promoting Bigotry

The Times published a hate-filled opinion column. It was titled, “Can My Children Be Friends With White People?”

The columnist, Ekow Yankah, writes there is “little reason for people of color to trust white people.”

He said he grew-up in “a classic Midwestern college town” that was diverse in population. There was trust among the races. But friendship, he writes, was out of the question. “[T]he ridiculous thing was thinking friendship was possible in the first place.”

The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech was a hope for the future. Yankah argues that King’s optimism was only a dream.

The columnist harbors suspicion of white strangers. Even the “chance encounter at the airport or [the] smiling white cashier” seem “unsafe to [him].” He writes he will teach his children suspicion and distrust of white people and “to have profound doubts that friendship with white people is possible.”

Consider this.

If you just swapped the terms “white” and “black” the Times would have never published this column. And rightly so.

But it did. Promoting hatred and bigotry in doing so.

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